Speaking following the Prime Minister's announcement to cancel Phase 2 of HS2, Rob Butler said:
Today the Prime Minister has announced that he’s scrapping Phase 2 of HS2, from Birmingham to Manchester.
I’ve always opposed HS2, saying we didn’t need this railway: it made no sense economically and it made no sense environmentally. It’s right that at last the project has been scrapped, but it’s a bittersweet moment here in Bucks, because for us, the damage has already been done. The construction of the line between London and Birmingham is unfortunately still going ahead, causing massive disruption to our day-to-day lives – creating traffic jams, damaging our roads and stopping local train services – while wreaking destruction across our landscape.
Yet there’s absolutely no benefit for local residents; there never has been, there never will be. I’ll be calling on the Government to devote some of the savings from scrapping Phase 2 of HS2 into improving transport here in the Aylesbury area, because it’s fundamentally wrong for local people to be forced to continue to suffer for a project they knew was a white elephant all along.
